“Being a citizen of the United States, I had thought, meant being an equal member of the American family, a spirited group of people of different races, origins, and creeds, bound together by common ideals,” writes Laila Lalami. “As time went by, however, the contradictions between doctrine and reality became harder to ignore. While my life in this country is in most ways happy and fulfilling, it has never been entirely secure or comfortable.”

Lalami is an American citizen. She earned that title in 2000, eight years after she came to this country to earn her doctorate at the University of Southern California. She is also a Muslim woman and a native of North Africa. She may have passed the United States’ citizenship test with ease, but because of the markers that identify her as an immigrant, Lalami’s citizenship is often treated as conditional.

In Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, Lalami examines the ways in which people of color and people who live in poverty are often treated as less than. It’s the first work of nonfiction for Lalami, a novelist who won an American Book Award and became a Pulitzer finalist for The Moor’s Account. In this new work, Lalami blends analysis of national and international events with her own personal narrative. For example, a woman at one of the author’s book events asks Lalami to explain ISIS. Would a white writer of a novel set in an earlier time be asked to explain the Ku Klux Klan, she wonders. Conditional citizenship means being seen as representative of a monolithic group, rather than as an individual. These citizens are often asked to explain their entire ethnic groups to white people, Lalami writes.

Conditional Citizens is thoroughly researched, as evidenced by its detailed source notes and bibliography, but in this gifted storyteller’s hands, it never feels like homework. Lalami braids statistics and historical context with her lived experiences to illustrate how unjust policies and the biases that feed them can affect individual lives.

In Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant. Weaving her own life story with key milestones in U.S. immigration history, she produces a brave examination of the United States’ shortcomings.

Written in Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. 

Hinojosa’s family traveled to the U.S. so her father could work as a researcher at the University of Chicago. When she was a child, they would drive from their home in Hyde Park into Chicago to see the big city, where Hinojosa would gaze at public housing developments, “massive brown cement towers, twenty floors of fencing around balconies and doors. No windows. I wondered why they had no windows even though they were built overlooking this beautiful lake. It seemed like a purposeful punishment.” It was an early glimpse into the inequities of racism to which Hinojosa would devote her journalistic career.

Hinojosa moved to New York City to study at Barnard College, where she found her voice as a radio host at the college station, cementing her career path. She took jobs at NPR, CNN, CBS and PBS, where she produced pieces that celebrated diversity and shone a light on immigration issues, including a groundbreaking report on “Frontline” about the immigration industrial complex and physical and sexual abuse at detention centers. She developed PTSD from the countless interviews she conducted with detainees, who told her stories of their horrific treatment.

As Hinojosa reported these stories, she maintained the objectivity that’s so crucial to journalists’ credibility, but she also kept close her own immigrant experience and her belief that America is long overdue for a reckoning. “My husband [the artist German Pérez] says that the reason this is so hard for me is because I believed in the promise of this country,” Hinojosa writes. “I bought into the exceptionalism. It’s hard to accept how ornery and normal and mediocre this country really is. I thought we were better than this. But we aren’t.”

Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. Written in Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, this memoir takes readers on a journey through one immigrant’s experience. Hinojosa was able to realize the American dream, but she urges us not to look away from all the others for whom America is a nightmare.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Maria Hinojosa reveals what it was like to narrate her memoir’s audiobook: “I am the character, she is me!”

Writer Eula Biss worked a variety of temporary jobs before achieving economic security as an English professor at Northwestern University. The moment her contract shifted from visiting artist to a more permanent title, Biss and her family bought a house. As she came to terms with her new success, she also found herself reflecting on precarity—as well as money, art and capitalism. Why is being an artist so at odds with the kind of mentality needed to find stability in our modern world? What do we give up as we pursue economic gain? How can we find agency—write our own rules for living—while also making our way within enormous capitalist systems that are entrenched and seemingly immovable? These are the big questions Biss approaches in her compulsively readable memoir, Having and Being Had, which blends research (the notes section is nearly 50 pages long), reflection and richly rendered personal experience. 

Noting how a person’s economic norms are largely determined by their social group, Biss brings people from her life into this story—acquaintances she sits by at dinner parties, friends with whom she swaps books, academics at Northwestern and fellow parents. She thinks about her mother and brother, her husband and son, her house and belongings, her old neighbors and new neighbors, and the big abstract things that inevitably shape how she sees and moves through the world: gentrification, whiteness, privilege and consumption. Through all of this, she keeps a careful eye on how engaging in capitalist economic systems—even as someone experiencing success—brings an unavoidable sense of alienation.

For Biss, art can address this feeling of alienation. And the artfulness of Biss’ prose is fully on display in this memoir, which is made of tiny short-form pieces strung together like beads on a necklace, each one leading to the next yet also standing alone like a perfectly formed droplet. This is a book that asks to be read, absorbed and read again.

In 1984, two men broke into Michelle Bowdler’s Boston apartment. They tied her up, blindfolded her, held a knife to her throat and raped her. After they left and once she freed herself, Bowdler immediately called the police. Cops took fingerprints and evidence from her home. She submitted to a rape kit at the hospital; nurses combed the crime scene that was her body for anything that might identify her rapists. Bowdler did everything that she thought she was supposed to do as a victim. 

Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto is about everything that happened—or more accurately, did not happen—afterward. The trauma began with the police officers who dismissively took a report in her living room. In the ensuing weeks, years and decades, the Boston Police Department’s mishandling became even worse. 

An article in the Boston Globe in 2007 prompted Bowdler to revisit her rape case and press the BPD for answers. At the time, there were many news stories about a backlog of untested rape kits. (It’s estimated that as many as 400,000 evidence kits have never been tested in the United States.) Bowdler argues that the word “backlog” implies a queue. The real problem is that law enforcement has not shown the will to pursue these crimes. 

Is Rape a Crime? blends Bowdler’s own narrative with detailed research about how law enforcement—from crime labs to individual cops—fail rape victims. Bowdler is candid about how trauma from the break-in, rapes and police inaction still affects her entire life. She is now a wife and mother of two, but piecing her life together following the rapes has been a slow process. Understandably, a lot of conversations about rape victims focus on positives, like their strength to survive. Bowdler’s voice in the conversation will make sure you know that her survival is hard won.